The Snow Child (12 page)

The next morning Jack nearly stepped on the small basket outside their door.

“Jack? What’s that you—”

“I’m not sure.” He set it on the table, and he and Mabel stood over it. It was made of birch bark, its seams crudely sewn with some kind of dried plant root. The basket fit perfectly in two cupped hands, and it was heaped with purple berries. Jack took one, rolled it between his finger and thumb, sniffed it, then put it to his tongue.

“Oh, Jack, you don’t know what it might be.”

“It’s a blueberry. Tastes like a blueberry.”

She frowned, but he put one to her mouth and she hesitantly tasted it.

“You’re right. They’re wild blueberries. Frozen like little marbles,” she said.

She sat at the table and touched the bark edges tentatively, as if the basket might break beneath her fingers. “Was it her?” she asked. “Did she bring these for us?”

“I guess she knew we were having pancakes for breakfast,” Jack said. Mabel did not smile.

“I’ll get some wood for the fire,” he said.

Jack followed his old tracks past the woodpile to the stump at the edge of the forest. The doll was gone. The child’s small footprints came toward the stump, went once around, and then straight back into the trees. Each track barely dented the snow, as if she weighed no more than a feather.

When he brought an armload of wood inside, Mabel was cooking pancakes. She dotted a few of the wild blueberries in each one, and they ate them at the table, the small basket between them. They did not talk about the child, not until the table was cleared and Jack was preparing to go back outdoors.

“I’m going to haul some wood from the east field. Everyone says we’ll have a cold spell soon.”

“How can you?” Mabel’s voice was hushed and trembling. “How can you eat your breakfast and go into the day as if none of this has happened?”

“It’s winter, and we need firewood.”

“She’s a child, Jack. You might not be able to admit it to the neighbors, but you’ve seen her, too. You know she’s out there.”

He sighed. He finished lacing up his boots, and then went to Mabel and put his hands on her shoulders.

“What can we do?”

“We must do something.”

“I just don’t know what…. I think she’s all right.”

Mabel narrowed her eyes. “How can she be all right? A child, wandering around in the middle of winter?”

“I think she’s warm. And she must know how to get food. Look at the berries, and that little basket. She knows her way out there, probably better than either of us.”

“But she’s just a child. A little girl.”

He thought Mabel would cry, and he wanted to be anywhere else. It was wrong and cowardly, and he’d done it before—when Mabel lost the baby and shook with grief, when the relatives whispered harsh words, when the Bensons asked about the child in the woods. But it was like the need to take a breath. The urge was too strong, and without saying another word, Jack left the cabin.

CHAPTER 10

S
nowflakes and naked babies tumbled through her nights. She dreamed she was in the midst of a snowstorm. Snow fell and gusted around her. She held out her hands and snowflakes landed on her open palms. As they touched her skin, they melted into tiny, naked newborns, each wet baby no bigger than a fingernail. Then wind swept them away, once again just snowflakes among a flurry of thousands.

Some nights she woke herself with her own crying. Others, Jack gently shook her. “Wake up, Mabel. You’re having a nightmare. Wake up.”

In the light of day, her dreams were drained of their nightmarish quality, and they seemed whimsical and strange, but the taste of loss remained in her mouth. It was difficult to focus on her tasks, and she often drifted aimlessly through her own mind. A faint memory emerged again and again—her father, a leather-bound fairy-tale book, a snow child alive in its pages. She couldn’t clearly recall the story or more than a few of the illustrations, and she began to worry over it, letting her thoughts touch it again and again. If there was such a book, could there be such a child? If an old man and woman conjured a little girl out of the snow and wilderness, what would she be to them? A daughter? A ghost?

She had sought reasonable explanations. She asked Esther about children who lived nearby. She urged Jack to inquire in town. But she had also taken note of those first boot prints in the snow—they began at the vanished snow child and ran from there into the woods. No tracks came into the yard.

Then there was the frost that crystallized on the window as she and Jack had watched, and the snowstorm that had blown her back toward home when she found the dead bird. Most of all, there was the child herself, her face a mirror of the one Jack had sculpted in the snow, her eyes like ice itself. It was fantastical and impossible, but Mabel knew it was true—she and Jack had formed her of snow and birch boughs and frosty wild grass. The truth awed her. Not only was the child a miracle, but she was their creation. One does not create a life and then abandon it to the wilderness.

A few days after the basket had appeared on their doorstep, Mabel decided to write to her sister, who still lived in the family home in Philadelphia. Perhaps the book was in the attic, along with the trunks of clothes and keepsakes that had accumulated there over the years. She sat down at the table, a loaf of bread baking in the oven, and was comforted by the act of writing. It gave her a rational purpose. Either the book was there or it wasn’t, but if her sister found it and sent it to her, Mabel was certain it would be of consequence. The book would tell her the fate of the old man and woman, and the child they had borne of snow.

“Dearest sister, I hope this letter finds you well. We are settling into winter here at the homestead,” she began.

She went on to describe the snow and mountains and their new friends the Bensons. She asked about her sister’s children, now grown, and the family home. Then, as casually as she could, she inquired about the book.

“Do you remember it, dear Ada? It was one of my favorites for some years of my childhood. I believe it was bound in blue leather, but I remember little of the story—not even the title. I am sure it is an impossible task I am asking of you, but trying to recall the details of the book has become such a distracting nuisance to my mind. It’s like having a person’s name on the tip of your tongue, nearly remembered but not quite. I only hope by some chance you know the book I am thinking of, and better yet know where to find it in all that jumble of trunks in the attic.”

Mabel also asked if her sister could send some new pencils, as she intended to pick up her former pastime and had only a few stubs in her drawing box.

She sealed the letter, set it aside, and went to the stove. She pulled the loaf of bread from the oven, thumped it softly to see if it was done, then slid it back into the heat. She glanced toward the window and saw Jack at the woodpile. And then she saw the little girl.

She stood in the trees just beyond. Jack hadn’t noticed her. He had taken off his coat and was splitting log after log, swinging the heavy maul above his head and bringing it down with a loud crack into the wood. The girl watched and then crept closer, hiding behind a birch tree and peeking around it. She wore the same coat of blue wool trimmed in white fur. Beneath the coat, Mabel could now see, was a light blue flower-print dress that came to below her knees, and high boots or moccasins made of some kind of animal skin and fur.

Mabel paced at the window. Should she go to the door and call out to Jack, or wait until he saw the girl himself? She was so near she hated to frighten her away. Then she saw Jack raise his head and look at the girl. The child was less than a dozen yards from him. Mabel held her breath. She could see Jack speaking but couldn’t hear his words. The child was motionless. Jack stepped closer, a hand extended toward her. The girl stepped back, and then Jack was speaking again. It was difficult to see from the window, but Mabel thought she saw the girl raise a hand in a red mitten and give a small wave. Mabel’s breath fogged the glass. She rubbed it with her hand just in time to see the girl turn and run into the trees. Jack stood with his arms at his sides, the maul at his feet, not moving. Mabel hurried to the door and pulled it open.

“Go, Jack! Go! Go after her!” Her voice was louder and shriller than she’d meant. He startled, then looked from Mabel to the woods and back again. At last he charged after the girl, first at a steady walk, then picking up his pace and trotting through the snow. His legs looked long and awkward as his big boots thumped beneath him. Nothing like the nimble sprint of the girl.

She waited at the window. Occasionally she went to the door, opened it, and looked out in all directions, but the yard and woods beyond were empty. Minutes went by, then an hour and another. She considered dressing in her winter boots and coat and going after them, but she knew that was not wise. Night came quickly on these short winter days.

As the cabin darkened, Mabel lit the oil lamps, put more wood on the fire, and tried to stop her rhythmic pacing. She thought of her mother, how often she had paced and wrung her hands when Mabel’s father didn’t come home from some late meeting at the university. She thought of the wives of soldiers, gold miners and trappers, drunks and adulterers, all waiting long into the night. Why was it always the woman’s fate to pace and fret and wait?

Mabel finally made herself sit by the woodstove with her sewing and tried to lose herself in the stitches. She didn’t know she had fallen asleep in the chair until Jack came in. His beard and mustache were caked with ice and his pant legs were stiff and snow-covered. He didn’t bother to take off his boots or stomp the snow from them but stumbled to the woodstove and held out his bare hands. He hadn’t been wearing gloves when she’d sent him after the girl. She took his hands in her own. Jack cringed at her touch.

“Are you frostbit?”

“I don’t know. Cold, that’s for sure.” His words slurred together, either from the ice in his mustache or from fatigue. Mabel rubbed his hands to move warm blood to the tips of the fingers.

“Did you catch up with her? What did you see?”

He slid his hands out of hers and pulled some of the ice from his mustache and beard. He took off his boots and then his coat and pants, which he hung from nails behind the woodstove to dry. The cabin smelled of warm, wet wool.

“Did you hear me? What did you find?”

He didn’t look up when he spoke, but instead turned from her and stumbled to their bedroom. “Nothing. I’m tired, Mabel. Too tired to talk.”

He climbed beneath the covers and was soon snoring softly, leaving Mabel alone again by the woodstove.

CHAPTER 11

J
ack had always considered himself if not brave, then at least competent and sure. He was wary of true danger, of flighty horses that could break your back and farm tools that could sever limbs, but he had always scoffed at the superstitious and mystical. Alone in the depths of the wilderness, however, in the fading winter light, he had discovered in himself an animal-like fear. What shamed him all the more was that he could not name it. If Mabel had asked what terrified him when he followed the girl into the mountains, he could only have answered with the timid uncertainty of a child scared of the dark. Disturbing thoughts whirled through his brain, stories he must have heard as a boy about forest hags and men who turned into bears. It wasn’t the girl that frightened him as much as the strange world of snow and rock and hushed trees that she navigated with ease.

The girl had deftly jumped logs and scampered through the woods like a fairy. He had gotten close enough to notice the brown fur of her hat and the knee-high leather moccasins that bound her feet. By the woodpile, when he had spoken to her, he had even caught sight of her blond eyelashes and the intensely blue eyes, and when he asked if she liked the doll, he saw her smile. The shy, sweet smile of a little girl.

But then she had become a phantom, a silent blur. As Jack tried to follow her, an icy fog moved through the forest. Minute crystals of ice filled the air and gathered as hoarfrost along the tree branches and on his lashes. He could see only a few feet into the mist. He stopped occasionally, bent with his hands on his knees while sweat froze at his brow. He tried to silence his heavy breathing, but then all he heard was the snow creaking beneath his boots. The child made no sound. He heard twigs crack, only to watch a snowshoe hare bound through the alders, and later, as night closed in, an owl hooted from far away. He never heard the girl. At times he wasn’t sure he was even following her anymore but instead blindly thrashing through the trees like a bewitched, crazy man. Then he would see her just ahead, as if she wanted to be seen.